London Calling: Did Allwinner outsell Intel, Qualcomm?

It may seem strange but in 2012 Chinese chip vendor Allwinner probably sold more processors for tablet computers than Intel and Qualcomm together.

It may seem strange but Chinese chip vendor Allwinner Technologies Co. Ltd. (Zhuhai, China) probably sold more application processors for tablet computers in 2012 than Intel and Qualcomm put together.

The numbers for annual sales of smartphones and tablet computers are growing fast and we think we know who the winners are: the likes of Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm and so on, right? But Strategy Analytics is reporting an interesting snippet from its market research; that in 2012 Chinese vendors grabbed 20 percent volume share of the tablet application processor market between them. That's in a market that by value grew 83 percent year-on-year to reach $2.7 billion, the firm reckons. So even if those Chinese vendors were selling at the low-end of the pricing spectrum this is not chicken feed.

Sravann Kundojjala, senior analyst with Strategy Analytics, pointed out that the Chinese vendors are selling dual-core ARM chips at $4 or $5 and quad-cores at $8 or $9, less than half what Nvidia is selling its equivalent chips for and so probably the Chinese vendors, while significant in volume, do not yet have 10 percent of the market by value.

Strategy Analytics reckons Apple had about 48 percent revenue share of the tablet processor market in 2012, although clearly their devices are captive in the iPad. Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Samsung and Qualcomm made up Strategy Analytics' top-five ranking of vendors. Strategy Analytics reckons Nvidia led the non-iPad tablet market with 27 percent revenue share in 2012 having scored high-profile design wins in the Google Nexus 7 and the Microsoft Surface RT.

So who are these Chinese tablet processor vendors? Strategy Analytics would like you buy a $6,999 report to find out their take on it.

-continue-For number of core, performances, graphics and other capabilities, surely its matter for very wise, knowledgeable, and savvy customers to have the best systems and don't forgot the loaded one but for average customers they may can't have the branded or advanced one and result in choosing unbranded devices as long they can get decent quality and can function well, they don`t care what ARM cortex the devices uses, just happy to having smartphone or tablet. And for high end chips suppliers those who want to target lower-end market, you must trying work for it or just forget it at all.
That all from me and sorry for long text. Thanks.

Try looking at mobile devices in global context. Let say I divided it in to three tiers. First tier come companies like Apple, Samsung, Sony, Asus, Motorola those easily be top mobile devices brands and of course serve high end market.Second tier here comes the emerging Chinese companies likes Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and semi famous brands like Viewsonic, Vizio, Miui, Acer, Toshiba, NEC where can go for high or low-end market.Third tier is place for unknown or no brand companies that serve low-end market and have the most companies may I say hundreds of its and many of them origin in China.
For first tier they surely be choosing well developed,proven, and high performance chips and mostly higher in price. Here were the likes of Qualcomm, NVidia, Mediatek and Broadcomm come to be first choice suppliers. And can I add prestige come to play. For second tier they may choose both ether the high-end suppliers or low end-suppliers and of course they will pick high end chips for high-end devices and low for low- end devices depending type of customers they want to penetrate.Lastly, third tier companies, here those companies like Allwinner,Rockchip, etc Mediatek include making huge play. Market here is huge although not high in value. And later trend is major OEM like Apple, Samsung and to lesser extent Huawei design and developed its own chips, suppliers has lost some large customers. -continue-

I agree that end-user marketing might just use "quadcore" (equating even Tegra4 performance to that of a four-core Core i7), but end-user marketing can almost as easily use meaningless phrases like "Energy-Sip Technology enhances battery life" or "Hyperspeed Acceleration supports advanced video output". "Quadcore" might be more terse and seemingly more definitive being numeric (which is better for marketing), but is not that much more informative.
A writer at EETimes should have a higher standard of technical clarity and correctness than end-user marketing does. I think even just mentioning that the equivalence was in terms of end-user marketing would be an improvement.

My hypothesis is that the average target customer of the alwinner AP based tablet may be oblivious to the fact that A7 and A15s are indeed different. They are happy with a "Quad" core device, which has supposedly "similar" performance of that of an iPad or Galaxy device.

I am skeptical of the statement "the Chinese vendors are selling dual-core ARM chips at $4 or $5 and quad-cores at $8 or $9, less than half what Nvidia is selling its equivalent chips". Two chips are not equivalent just because they have the same core count. While branding and established relationships between suppliers and users can support higher prices, it seems unlikely that such fully explains the price difference.
E.g., Nvidia's Tegra4i (their lower-end quad-core) uses Cortex-A9 which supports out-of-order execution (The Tegra4 uses Cortex-A15 cores which have much higher performance.), while the Allwinner A31 uses Cortex-A7 cores which are in order; so these have significantly different performance (and chip area). (Some quick searching also seems to indicate that Tegra4i has a 2.3 GHz clock speed vs. 1.2 GHz for A32!) In addition, Nvidia doubtless emphasizes GPU performance.
Note that the Allwinner A31 might be better suited than the Tegra4i to the low-end tablet market where processing performance may not be that critical. Tegra4i also includes cell-phone specific functionality, increasing Nvidia's fixed and incremental costs. However, these two chips are *clearly* not "equivalent".

Nothing new in all this. "London Calling" should have simply called and read data published many months ago by Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and/or JPMorgan, many other. I hope that
Stratey Analytics acqnowledged its sources.
What is completely missing in this old news are two items:
1. Allwinner is entering smartphone market
2. Most of China's whitebox tablet vendors already now have Quad-core AP

Why you even asking that kind of question when you have collected number of data from number of resource? Is their data found incorrect or lies. You stated here from Strategy Analytics wheres Allwinner have outsold Qualcomm and Intel combined and you added this two companies misses the tablet boat when only captured less than 5% of tablet chips market share that's is the hint here. And keep in mind that the dozen of Chinese OEM alone can become the source of Allwinner market shares.